High school girls cross country: Cary-Grove's Allison Drage no ordinary freshman

Finding their favorite Allison Drage moment from her high school cross country career is difficult for her Cary-Grove coaches and teammates … and Drage has only been running varsity for five weeks.

Trojans senior Sarah Caesar remembers the effervescent freshman at the McHenry County Meet, after Drage had won the freshman-sophomore race.

“We were doing a little pep talk and she came up and was screaming, ‘Let’s go guys! We got this! It was such a fast course! You guys can do this! You’’re going to feel amazing!’ ” Caesar said. “She was so pumped. She should have been exhausted, she was going crazy and we were like, ‘Oh, my gosh, did she even run?’ It was inspiring. It was really cool.”

C-G coach Mark Anderson recalls the postrace breakdown after Drage’s first varsity race, a second-place finish at the Wauconda Invitational on Sept. 10. Anderson and sssistant coach Tom Smith go over the girls’ races with them, analyzing what happened.

“It’s unreal. It’s unreal the kind of feedback [Drage] gives you,” Anderson said. “It’s like talking to a collegiate athlete. She just remembers it. A lot of kids are like, ‘Ah, I can’t remember.’ She understands the sport. It’s a trip.”

Drage (pronounced DRAH-gee) is 5-foot-1, 92 pounds of pure energy who will be an individual favorite at the Fox Valley Conference Cross Country Meet, which starts at 10 a.m. Saturday at Veteran Acres Park in Crystal Lake.

Crystal Lake Central will be chasing back-to-back team titles with its entire roster back from last season.

Crystal Lake South’s Jack Becker and Prairie Ridge’s Filip Pajak are the favorites in the boys race, which starts at 11. There will be a new team champion because defending winner Grayslake Central is in the Northern Lake County Conference.

Anderson knew Drage was good after she took second in the Illinois Elementary School Association State Meet to Cheyenne Scott, who now runs at Danville Schlarman.

“Did I know she’d be 17:30, 3-mile good? I don’t know,” Anderson said. “The first week of the summer, Tom and I knew she was the real deal."

Drage’s athletic career started as a soccer player. Her first track and field experience was as a sprinter, but she later learned she was a natural for distance racing.

“My goal is to get better every meet, whether it’s speed or at smarts, and just be progressive this whole season and not really slow down or get injured,” Drage said. “Just to run a smart, healthy, building-up-meet kind of season. You know, freshman season, learn the ropes and all that.”

Drage is a quick study. The increase in distances from 2 to 3 miles in high school hasn’t fazed her. She seems right at home running with the top runners in each meet, and even finished one spot ahead of South senior Caitlin Bruzzini, the McHenry County Meet champion, at the Wauconda Invitational.

“I saw Caitlin and thought, ‘That’s somebody I want to be by,’ ” Drage said. “Her whole race is under control. I wanted to get in that top pack, stay steady, stay strong and use all the heart and see how fast I can go. I was really excited.”

Caesar has triplet siblings who are freshmen, so she has tracked Drage’s progress and is not surprised.

“I expected her to do really great,” Caesar said. “I ran with her in middle school and she would always tell me, ‘Oh, you’re my role model.’ And I was thinking, ‘You’re going to kick my butt in high school.’ ”

What Drage did at the prestigious Palatine Invitational, one of the state’s top meets each season, truly impressed Anderson.

“She had a massive head cold,” Anderson said. “I would have pulled her out, and she said, ‘No, I want to run. I’ll be fine.’ She took ninth.”

Drage said she started the season just wanting to crack the lineup and keep improving.

“I got to high school and everything changed,” she said. “We have better workouts, it’s more competitive, it’s more personalized. It was a whole new world. With that training it all came together, and I unlocked a bit more of myself I didn’t think I had.”